Background and aims of the study
The Eastern Gangetic plains is a region characterized by a high incidence of poverty, and high inequalities in the distribution of assets, as well as unequal gender and caste relations. Between 2014 and 2020 an ACIAR funded consortium of academic, NGO and government research partners, established 20 Farmer Collectives across six villages in Nepal, Bihar and the northern belt of West Bengal to address these development challenges in the agricultural sector. Five were entirely run by women, while the remainder were mostly led by women, yet contained some male members.
Prior to the interventions, food insecurity was substantial, and male out-migration have left many women managing both farm work and housework under severe resource constraints. In the Bihar sites a large proportion of farmers were tenants, working for landlords. The women who increasingly run the agricultural sector experience limited ownership of assets or networks to access state resources, and low bargaining power with landlords and in agricultural markets. To address this situation, the Farmer Collectives which were founded were focused on group farming (see Agarwal, 2010) – whereby farmers pool land, labour, capital and skills to create larger units of production. Farmers benefited from much more efficient use of irrigation and of labour, and achieved economies of scale in machine use, input application and irrigation, while increasing farmers’ bargaining power with landlords and in agricultural markets. The collectives also supported better organisation for claiming state subsidies and other resources.
This current project, seeks to expand the scope of our tried and tested model of women run agricultural collectives, so their members, into agro-processing. In Bihar, we are supporting our collectives in Madhubani district in establishing a makhana processing enterprise. Makhana, the seeds of the prickly water lily (euryale ferox), are produced in village ponds. This highly nutritious food has high demand in large cities, but due to lack of value addition and marketing, this industry is on the verge of extinction in Madhubani. Most of the profit is taken by big companies, and the women who produce the crop (particularly from the marginalized Mallah community) receive a very poor return for raw Makhana, and thus incentives to produce it have declined. Small scale village processing has been constrained by lack of capital and ability to compete, constraints that we anticipate the collectively run enterprise model can overcome.
In West Bengal, the women’s led collective enterprise group will produce organic inputs for agriculture including vermin compost, trichoderma, neem oil, and azolla. Then they will be selling it through fertilizer shops, distributers, and retailers to promote eco-friendly cultivation. It will also provide door service to small and marginal farmers in selling organic inputs at competitive cost in compare to the inputs they use on date.
The project will monitor these two sets of interventions through an iterative engagement with the collective members and qualitative enquiry. It is hoped that this will showcase a new path for rural small scale industrialization in South Asia grounded in collective rather than individual enterprise.
What is unique about our approach?
There are two unique aspects of this pilot. Firstly, it seeks higher levels of cooperation than many conventional enterprises which mobilize women’s collective action. Collective action in women’s run enterprises are often focused on particular stages in the production process. This includes for example, the procurement of credit or savings to invest in an enterprise, which are often a central function of the 2.6 million registered Self Help Groups in India. Other stages of production where collective action takes place includes the marketing of produce or sharing of equipment. This proposed project however, builds upon a model promoting much higher levels of cooperation, whereby collective action takes place across the production cycle – and entails the pooling of labour, assets, land and profits. When combined with the existing farmer collectives, we are promoting collective action across the production cycle from field to finished product.